I don't have a starting point for this one. This story comes from a couple weeks during my grand tour of Europe. There was a woman I met, a couple years older than me, in Prague. Blond, Germanic. Annelise had a kind of chiseled face, in an attractive way. Hard to explain.
The tacit agreement anytime you sleep with a traveler the night you met him is that it is casual. Not, realistically, I know better than this. If a woman is near a guy, she wants a relationship. If she says it's casual and non-committal, she's lying.
Women think time spent with a man will eventually overcome all obstacles. I think this is one of the reason my relationships with women trouble me. I tend to have to have short sexual relationships. And it's hard to feel good about myself knowing that almost every woman I ever fucked was lying to me, hoping that the magic would kick in and I'd fall madly in love.
As to Annelise . . . the relationship was sex. It wasn't great sex, because she liked very dominant, rough, man-on-top stuff. Not my forte, to tell the truth. We usually did it twice in a session. Strangely, I got to get my first orgasm my way, and then the second turn was her way.
Two nights before I was set to leave Prague, Annelise asked me this question: "Do you think I'm the kind of girl you could ever see yourself having kids with?"
I think this is the single most devastating question a woman has ever asked me.
There's a lot of vulnerability in that question.
One of the things I loved with women in Prague is that on the surface there is a ridiculous confidence, a brazen sexuality and an almost masculine aloofness. But, once you have them cornered, all you had to do was turn on the charm and they melted like a fucking ice cube on hundred degree day. Tell a couple jokes, press a couple of her buttons and away you go -- shit a woman in New York would treat you like a retard for trying.
The further east you get in Europe, the more brutish the men become. I know that's a stereotype, but some stereotypes have been earned the hard way. Prague is the first place you realize that western European gender equity gives way to something entirely alien to Americans.
What makes that funny is that as an American guy, you spend your whole life turning on the charm just to get one fucking smile from one pretty girl. Those Eastern European girls act like they've never had a boy act cute around them before. It's astonishing how fast they break down when a boy turns it on. I'm telling ya, you could be Wilt Chamberlain in the old Warsaw Pact countries just by showing up on dates with a daisy you plucked from the front yard. As best I can tell, those women have never seen charm before. It's kinda tragic and makes you think about fucked up for how long those countries had to be for people to have gotten to that point.
That question, "Do you think I'm the kind of girl you could ever see yourself having kids with?" is the core question between men and women. But, no one ever actually says it! To ask the question borders upon naive. To ask the question of a foreigner you're casually fucking around with? Is that even possible?
Needless to say, that's where it ended. Cordial enough. But, after a half hour in the room with that question, I left. I didn't see her again before I left Prague. How could I?
Annelise's question itself is innocent to the point of being painful. It makes her look like an ingenue. It makes me look evil. But, the truth is it's the question that hangs over every sexual relationship we have.
I know the truth about women. Casual sex is a myth. More horrifying, though, is the fact that women will agree to it on the slenderest of hopes.
Every woman thinks she's special. She's the one. This is going to work out. That giant rush of endorphins is going to overwhelm him. He's gonna feel it and fall in love with me. And if that doesn't work, she'll fuck him so hard he'll never want another woman again. And if that doesn't work, she'll take such good care of him that he'll never need another woman in his life.
I know how women see me.
I'm physically imposing. If I'm with a woman, people will ask her if I'm her bodyguard. If I'm by myself at a bar, people assume I'm a bouncer. I give off a serious don't-fuck-with-me vibe. Actually, it's more fuck-with-me-and-you-die.
When a girl sees me turn on the charm, it feeds into one of the great female fantasies. Women fear physical men. They know the cost of being wrong about us. When the charm comes on and she lets go of all those fears, a woman's mind rushes the opposite direction. The impact of emotions is defined by the height of the tensions.
I think about this woman, this Annelise from Prague. I think about her because she encompasses everything I hate about sex with women. I don't fall in love. The relationships I do manage are short and sexual. And I feel immense responsibility for the harm these relationships cause. I hate how it makes me feel.
"Do you think I'm the kind of girl you could ever see yourself having kids with?"
Remember this question. It's the question almost every woman harbors when she is with you.
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